Daniel Ottensamer presents Brahms' two legendary clarinet sonatas, reworked for clarinet and orchestra by Stephan Koncz, who also conducts the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin on this recording. Koncz' orchestrations bring these masterful pieces out of the limited space of chamber music, presenting them in a new symphonic light. The idea to create this very personal album has accompanied them both since their student days, and now the time to turn this vision into reality has finally come. Brahms' well-known works are accompanied by a hidden gem, Walter Rabl's clarinet quartet, which won first prize in a prestigious competition, of which Brahms himself served as the head of jury. Pianist Christoph Traxler and Berlin Philharmonic's first concertmaster Noah Bendix-Balgley join Ottensamer in this performance, while Koncz exchanges his baton for the cello. Combining Brahms and Rabl gives the listener a fascinating view on the rich musical landscape of late nineteenth-century Vienna. Daniel Ottensamer has been hailed as one of the prominent clarinettists of today and is enjoying a multi-faceted career as soloist, chamber musician and principal clarinettist of the Vienna Philharmonic. Stephan Koncz is a cellist of the Berlin Philharmonic, and divides his time between composing/arranging, conducting, and various chamber music groups, often together with Ottensamer, pianist Traxler, violinist Bendix-Balgley and their Vienna Berlin Music Club - namely "Philharmonix". The Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin (DSO) emanates into the world from renowned Berliner Philharmonie, while remaining societally relevant at all times, close to people and keeping pace with the times. All performers make their PENTATONE debut.

The young, Italy-based Quartetto Werther, regarded as one of the most promising rising chamber ensembles in the Italian and international concert scene, presents two masterpieces from the piano quartet repertoire: a lesser known work by the 16-year-old Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Johannes Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 3, a composition he grappled with for nearly twenty years. This GENUIN release pays homage to three towering figures of Romanticism: Mendelssohn, Brahms, and the literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, without whom these works might never have come into existence. Firmly grounded in Goethe's poetic legacy and performed with extraordinary musical and technical refinement, this album brings both fresh revelations and long-overdue rediscoveries to light!

This album features the late piano works of Johannes Brahms, beautifully played by pianist Daniel Shapiro.

The poet's words awaken the song that sleeps dreamily in all things, as Eichendorff aptly put it. According to Romantic artistic aesthetics, however, only instrumental music can reveal the inexpressible. The two works by Brahms and Schubert presented here harbour auratic traits that can be traced back to the origin of their lyrical themes in their own songs.

The special vibrations that the Hohenstaufen Chamber Music Festival generates are directly audible in the contents of this anniversary CD box, which consists solely of live performances. The choice of music ranges far and wide through all periods and genres: from Johann Sebastian Bach through key works of the Viennese Classical school and the German Romantics to French Impressionist compositions and classics of the Modern era. There are jazz numbers and contemporary works too, a further pointer to the ethos of the Hohenstaufen Chamber Music Festival, which does not call for tradition to be upheld on principle but aims at a constant rediscovery of the world and it's inhabitants through their sounds and timbres, no matter whether they come from "old" or "new", "serious" or "light" music. Hohenstaufen doesn't pigeonhole things like that; it believes in taking your partners to make "good" music. Music is good, quite simply, when it moves us, uplifts us, challenges us. "Music must never be comfy," to quote the pithy conclusion that Helmuth Rilling, to whom the Festival is greatly indebted, once drew. "It must stir people, touch them personally, give them food for thought." If the pieces brought together here can achieve this, the Hohenstaufen Chamber Music Festival will have received the biggest twentieth birthday present it could have.

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

Brahms's Third Piano Quartet gestated for a long time - the first sketches were made in 1855, whilst the work was not completed until 1875. Numerous commentators tie the work to Brahms's infatuation with Clara Schumann, who certainly heard many of the various iterations of the piece before it's final version. But Brahms did not write programme music, and whatever his motivations may or may not have been, the result is, like the rest of his output, pure music. Louise Heritte-Viardot was a French singer, pianist, conductor, and composer. She was born in Paris, the eldest child of Pauline Viardot-Garcia and Louis Viardot, and sister to the violinist and conductor Paul Viardot. Her singing career was cut short by illness, but with the help of Clara Schumann she found a second career as a singing teacher at the Hoch Conservatory, in Frankfurt. In contrast to Brahms's quartet, Viardot's work is extremely programmatic. Titled I'm Sommer (In Summer), it comprises four movements which also carry evocative titles: 'Morning, in the Woods', 'Flies and Butterflies', 'Sultriness', and 'Evening, under the Oak-tree'.

Brahms: Complete Trios

Before conquering concert halls with his symphonies, Johannes Brahms made a name for himself as a choral conductor. He led vocal ensembles in his hometown of Hamburg, in Detmold and Vienna, enriching the repertoire with his own music. Composed between 1865 and 1868, Ein deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) is his most extensive choral work and a milestone in his artistic development. In this work, Brahms combined text passages from the Old and New Testaments in an unconventional way: the 'target' of the text and music is no longer the deceased, for whose salvation we pray, but the survivor, who is to be consoled. He thus turned away from ecclesiastical conventions and created a very atypical requiem which has nothing to do with the Catholic Church's often-set Latin requiem mass. Instead, it was conceived from the outset for the concert hall or church concerts. Musically the Requiem draws from earlier traditions in a highly personal way while remaining firmly in a Romantic choral idiom, at times embedded in lush orchestral textures. After countless acclaimed recordings devoted to the religious music of Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Masaaki Suzuki and the Bach Collegium Japan now present their unique vision of Brahms's masterpiece.

JOHANNES BRAHMS - HUNGARIAN DANCES: Before the publication of his Hungarian Dances in their original version for piano four hands, Johannes Brahms was hardly known to the educated middle classes, but the works ensured that the composer became a household name. In their subsequent orchestral versions, the Dances entered the repertoire of prestigious concert orchestras and, after music had become technically reproducible, went on to become even more massively popular. On this CD, BR-KLASSIK presents Brahms' 21 Hungarian Dances in their orchestral versions, in a studio production with the Munich Radio Orchestra under it's former chief conductor Roberto Abbado. Johannes Brahms had become acquainted with Hungarian melodies and scales through the Hungarian violinist Eduard Remenyi, with whom he had undertaken his first concert tour in 1853. His Hungarian Dances for piano four hands were composed from around 1858 onwards; the first ten were published in 1869, the others in 1880. In 1872, Brahms presented a version of the first ten dances for solo piano and in 1873 he orchestrated Dances Nos. 1, 3 and 10, premiering them in Leipzig on February 5, 1874. In his Hungarian Dances, Brahms skilfully combined various Hungarian folk song melodies with his own. The fact that the originals were, and remain, unknown to most listeners is probably what makes the compositions so appealing. His Hungarian Dances were extremely popular right from the start, and are still among his best-known works today. None other than Antonin Dvorak was responsible for the orchestrations of other dances, and popular orchestral versions were also produced by Albert Parlow, Andreas Hallen, Martin Schmeling, Paul Juon and Hans Gal.

Christian Euler, together with his piano partner Paul Rivinius, present two Brahmsian masterpieces which foreshadow the fin de siecle and contrast these with Schumann's "Marchenbilder", whose fairytale-like character is reflected in the music's imaginative narrative gesture, transporting the listener into an enchanting world full of magic, poetry and longing.

OFRA HARNOY COLLECTION VOLUME